Review on MSI ProSeries B450M PRO-M2 Max micro-ATX Motherboard with AMD Ryzen 💻 1st and 2nd Gen AM4, M.2, USB 3, DDR4, D-Sub, DVI, HDMI by Wendy Backous

Pros: - Decent price, around $75 at time of purchase - Good build quality. I had no problems with this when assembling a PC. - Built-in storage profiles. I can't speak to every possible memory type, but I paired it with an inexpensive kit of the Patriot Viper 4 Series Extreme Performance DDR4 16GB (2 x 8GB) 3200MHz (PC4-25600) and I didn't have to do anything special or custom create settings. I selected the first of the built-in advanced profiles and rebooted the system; The next time I went into the BIOS, the memory was running at rated speed. The BIOS and the onboard HDMI port worked great with the AMD Ryzen 5 3400G chip with integrated Vega graphics. The version of the board I received does not require any special update. Everything was plug and play except for switching to the first advanced storage profile. Cons: - One of my older mobile devices can update the BIOS itself (through the BIOS UI you can tell it to update and if it has a network connection it can do it itself). With that, I had to use a utility on Windows to download it. Not too many cons, but after the convenience of another board, I figured other boards would have the same features. If you need a lot of expansion options, you need another board. It has two memory banks and not many expansion slots; understandable because of the Micro-ATX format, but you just have to know. I think overall this is a very good board. Lots of power and features for the budget PC I built it on. The only quirk was that I had to buy a splitter cable for the fans. Mobo has one CPU fan header and another fan header. I needed a splitter as there were two fans in the case.